alt Hacker NewsLike the original Grammarly, I think this can be useful for business writing because these tools help you get to the point. Many students are rewarded for using flowery language in school essays, but if you're composing an email or writing a design doc, just optimize for reading time and clarity.
But for general use, I think this is misguided. The problem with LLM output is not that it's using em dashes or words such as "crucial". It's that most LLM articles on LinkedIn or on personal blogs just take a one-sentence prompt and dress it up into a lot of pointless words, wasting everyone's time: "I had a shower thought and I asked a chatbot to write five pages of text about it." I don't need prettier words, I need there to be far fewer of them?
On the flip side, if you're a human and actually have something of consequence to say, "delve" all you want.
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> "I had a shower thought and I asked a chatbot to write five pages of text about it." I don't need prettier words, I need there to be fewer of them?
Always judge an author by the length of their text.
Decades of insights barely condensed into 200 pages? Great! Hours of thought expanded into 200 pages? Very bad.
Same length of text but lands very differently. Same is true for emails, tweets, videos, and even just talking. Say less! But not too little either.
Tangential, but I remember when I was studying for the ACT, there was something in one of the practice books that stuck with me. I'm paraphrasing but it was something like "Good writing is clear and easy to understand. It's about communication, make sure you communicate".
It was something that I guess I logically knew but hadn't fully realized. I had always tried to be fancy with my writing and pad it out to meet minimum word counts, with "understand-ability" being somewhat of an afterthought. Just that one statement in my ACT prep book made me, in my opinion, a significantly better writer.
As a senior engineer I spend a lot of time reviewing and approving technical designs, PRDs etc.
Over the years the amount of basic copy editing I have to do has really grown. I sometimes feel like I’m removing 20%+ of the text. And that was before LLMs.
Yeah, this comic summarizes the issue pretty well: https://marketoonist.com/2023/03/ai-written-ai-read.html
> Many students are rewarded for using flowery language in school essays
Not to nitpick, but I actually had the opposite experience in uni. My prof docked me marks for my flowery language, and honestly, good for her, my lazy writing style honestly sucks (see how I used "honestly" twice in the same sentence, lol).
Not to take away from your post or anything, just realising I got lucky with my prof. I agree that LLMs produce way too much output when generating writing (and code too!)
Flowery language is important but something like BLUF - Bottom Line Upfront[0] is important too.
While it's important for universities to continue to teach the ability to write using 'flowery' language I think that it is also important that schools teach students something like BLUF -- Bottom Line Upfront.[0]
Compare and contrast those two sentences. I'm fine writing a comment that us just the first sentence and the link without a footnote but I know as a message it won't go over well on a site like Hackernews. They looooooove their verbosity here.
So in some situations you have to gussy it up -- give it some of that Emeril "BAM". The deal is that you have to know your audience. The medium is the message.[1] shit like that.
Stuff on Linkedin is full of pointless words because that's what Linkedin is for -- it's about signalling to other people that you can string together a bunch of pointless words that are effusive and vaguely passive aggressive at the same time -- you know, typical business shit.
“Whether in a suit or in a loincloth people are ignorant little thorns cutting into one another. They seem incapable of advancing beyond the violent tendencies which at one time were necessary for survival.”
We can delve into this kinda stuff but really it just comes back to the know your audience and that the medium is the message. Also don't repeat your self.
Definitely don't repeat yourself.
>The problem is not X. It's Y.
Your writing style, if not your thoughts, have already been infected by LLM prose.
I've heard this theory in the past:
In a couple of years, the corporative communication will work like this:
You write a bunch of bullet points and feed them to an AI to create a beautiful and well written email. Your reader will feed that email into his own AI and he will generate bullet points to read.